The Plug-In Drug

The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, And The Family is a book of social criticism written by Marie Winn and published in 1977 by Viking Penguin with the ISBN 0140076980. In it, Winn brought the communications medium of television under withering fire, accusing it of wielding an addictive influence on the very young.

Wrote Winn:

"The very nature of the television experience apart from the contents of the programs is rarely considered. Perhaps the ever-changing array of sights and sounds coming out of the machine--the wild variety of images meeting the eye and the barrage of human and inhuman sounds reaching the ear--fosters the illusion of a varied experience for the viewer. It is easy to overlook a deceptively simple fact: one is always watching television when one is watching television rather than having any other experience."

A 25th-anniversary revision was published in 2002, which included new material that was subtitled "Television, Computers, And Family Life". Winn was even more hostile to the Internet and the World Wide Web than she had been to television itself twenty-five years before.

References

• Harrington, Stephanie (March 20, 1977). "Does television hurt the head?; The Plug-in Drug". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
• Johnson, Nicholas (March 6, 1977). "TV's Child Is Full of Woe". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
• Shulins, Nancy (October 9, 1987). "Kicking the plug-in drug habit // One woman's crusade for surviving without TV". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2009-01-12.
• "Winn, Marie. The Plug-In Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life". Library Journal. May 1, 2002. Retrieved 2009-01-12.